In both Jane Eyre and The Flight of Gemma Hardy characters repeatedly call the main characters by a wrong name. But while in Jane Eyre it seems to be a mis-name, or a pet name, In The Flight of Gemma Hardy it is very purposeful. Gemma changes her name to Jean after leaving Sinclair and begin searching for a job. She not only changes her name, but increases her age on job applications and creates more or less a false identity. From this point on the story and Jane Eyre differ greatly. While Jane is called Janet repeatedly by different characters, Gemma goes for over a half a dozen chapters by Jean, fooling everyone around her, including her fiance.
ENGL 628 Jane Eyre Neo-Victorian Appropriations Dashboard
Description
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) is a seminal text in the Western feminist literature canon, published fifty-five years after Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and a year before the Seneca Falls convention launched the feminist movement in Western culture. Scores of authors, directors, and digital producers have attempted not just to adapt but to appropriate, revise, and modernize Charlotte Bronte’s most famous novel. Antonija Primorac contends that the current vogue of neo-Victorianism is “a powerful trend in contemporary Anglophone media” pointing to the “continuous production of adaptations and appropriations of Victorian literature and culture.” In order to be considered neo-Victorian, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn posit that “texts (literary, filmic, audio / visual) must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians” (emphasis in original). In this class, we will explore the creative and rhetorical choices twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors have made when appropriating, revising, and modernizing Jane Eyre’s narrative, paying particular attention to gender ideology in the Victorian era and in more recent times. In this course, we will also leverage the new media capabilities of the COVE (Central Online Victorian Educator) web site in order to examine more deeply the impact of multimodal writing and digital technology on literary studies in the twenty-first century.
Galleries, Timelines, and Maps
(Gemma Hardy p. 1629
Fiddlesticks are traditional instruments used to play violins. Those have been named in English since the 15th century - then as 'fydylstyks'. The word was appropriated to indicate absurdity in the 17th century. Thomas Nashe used it that way in the play Summer's Last Will and Testament, 1600. There's nothing inherently comic about a violin bow. It seems that 'fiddlestick' was chosen just because it sounds like a comedy word, like 'scuttlebutt' (a cask of drinking water), 'lickspittle' (a sycophant) and 'snollygoster' (an unprincipled person). It referred to something insignificant, 'fiddlesticks' was originally 'fiddlestick's end', that is, it was a reference to something paltry, trifling and absurd.
https://www.phrases.org.uk › meanings › fiddlesticks
Percy the Bad Chick (p. 177 Gemma Hardy)
This book that Nell was reading was part of a series called Old Lob, stories of a kindly farmer with a large range of livestock including Percy, whose adventures helped children to read in Primary School. Introduced in the Forties, it mimicked what I experienced in grade school when introduced to the Dick and Jane books with their dog Spot. Other Old Lob characters included Master Willy the pig, Mr. Grumps the goat, Miss Tibbs the cat, and Mrs. Cuddy the cow.
(archive.spectator.co.uk/article/19th-december-1981/34/old-lobs-hour)
A Bottle of Ribena (p. 48 Gemma Hardy)
Ribena was a British-origin brand of blackcurrant-based fruit drink concentrate used to produce carbonated and uncarbonated soft drinks.. It was produced by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) until 2013, when the brand was sold to Suntory.
The brand had a strong reputation as a healthy product for children, stemming from its distribution to children as a vitamin C supplement during World War II by the British government. Beecham (a company that has been part of GSK since 2000) bought the brand in 1955 and developed many soft drink versions. A series of scandals in the 2000s, concerning vitamin C levels...
moreAs I have been reading Jane Eyre I'm reminded of a project that I did as part of a class in undergrad with Dr. Jen Boyle regarding the creation of the Gutenberg Press and tracking literacy rates in Europe. I think that tracing literary references throughout Jane Eyre could be a tedious, yet fulfilling prospect of connecting literacy rates, patterns of speech, and maybe help readers understand connections between the scholarship of our author Charlotte Bronte and of the time of Jane Eyre's publishing in 1847.
It is important to show the educational background she gives Jane in the novel, by continuing to reference Biblical, Poetic, Literature, and...
moreWhile I knew after our class last week that location was indeed important in the novel, I did not realize how much Bronte jumps all over Great Britian, and even in France. (I tried to add points on the map, but nothing would save, so I thought I would create a list with the different locations I've read about in the book.) The counties that are the main subjects of the novel are Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Derbyshire. I found two creative ways to track the locations listed throughout the novel, first through ARCGIS using topographic details and places cited in the text, and finding other researchers who have been studying the georgraphic details of Jane Eyre, and scholarly articles to locate places such as Cowan Bridge, which many believe is what Lowood School is based on. Next I looked at filming locations of the 2011, film Jane Eyre, while not exactly like the book, they specifically filmed in the United Kingdom to keep the character of the novel. These are...
moreMap of locations relevant to Jane Eyre and its Adaptations / Appropriations
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In April Lindner’s Jane, the late-night sketch comedy show, Saturday Night Live (SNL), is referenced by Nico Rathburn within Chapter 7, when he personally details his backstory to Jane Moore, in relation to Celine’s (Maddy’s mother) love affair in France. He confides to Jane that, “She’d been seeing her boyfriend, Jean Paul LeFevre—Can you believe that name? It’s like a parody of a Latin lover in a Saturday Night Live skit, for God’s sake” (Lindner 92). Though only mentioned in passing, this allusion operates both culturally and geographically within the context of the novel. Geographically, Saturday Night Live is produced at Studio8H, NBC Studios, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, within New York City—approximately a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Thornfield Park in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Culturally, the SNL allusion operates on two levels: the first being Nico Rathburn’s...
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